Why Can't I Vote?

After watching all these presidential debates I’ve been trying to do the science and figure this bullshit out. I’m definitely an anti-conservative-cocksucker motherfucker—in general, it was the Repunklicans in New York that kept the Rockefeller Drug Laws alive for so long and made so many of us suffer. And, of course, Bush and his posse were criminally insane scumbags that forever tainted the Republican party for me. Not to mention Romney is a fucking bitch. Sorry to offend a group of people by being a bigot, but I am a bigot, ‘cause I don’t like Mormons. They’re weird. McCain and Palin? Whatta couple of assholes! It’s obvious that people like that are not my bag of Bravos… I have family members and friends with different politics and it’s difficult to love them sometimes. If you’re a rich guy and you’re Republican ‘cause you don’t want to be taxed twice and pay the death tax, well, I ain’t mad at you. But, when people try to validate certain shit like the Iraq war just because they feel like they have to remain loyal to their people, it infuriates me. Plus, Obama just seems smart, rational, and borderline cool. I find it hard to dislike him even though he’s involved in some very dishonest activites. I’ll take him over Mittens any day. So there, in a buttshell, is my politics.

However, you do have to wonder about all the disenfranchised criminal voters and how they might possibly sway an election. I read a stat that says one in every 100 Americans is locked up. That sounds high to me. I think the US has 2.2 million locked up and closer to 300 million in the country, so that number doesn’t seem quite right to me. Although in a state like New York, with a huge metropolitan area full of minorities and the fascist cops arresting tons of people thanks to the “stop and frisk” fuckery, we probably easily have 1 percent of the population behind bars and even more under supervision. Now, technically, only felons can’t vote, so some folks locked up for misdemeanors and probation violation type shit can still vote, but I still think one out of 100 people in the state can’t cast a ballot, ‘cause there are a lotta folks that caught a felony in the 80s and lost their right to vote permanently.

Plus, the elections will be more fun when the candidates have to briefly pander to the criminal contingent. One out of every 100 people is a pretty large interest group. If felons could vote, I think we’d hear about the future of law enforcement in this country and which one of these crackers is all for increased imprisonment and which one realizes how insane and immoral the prison-industrial complex is.

We’d also probably hear a bit about marijuana legalization. Weed played an important part in my arrest—that’s how they got the search warrant to get me, ‘cause some mental midget bought an eighth off me and it turned out he was a CI (confidential informant) setting up an observed buy or some dumb shit. Anyhow, I can’t wait till weed plays a big role in the election, ‘cause the fact that this beautiful plant is still illegal or at least not 100 percent decriminalized is pretty damn laughable, especially when the majority of the country wants it legalized at this point. I patiently await the day some bozo gets the balls to finally do the right thing. Obama has greatly disappointed on this front. I’m pretty sure he even had something to do with the crackdown on dispensaries in Cali with shit-for-brains, raisins-for-nuts Eric Holder, so they can both eat a babydick sandwich for that. Instead of going after real scumbags, they’re going after burned-out hippies puffing on lettuce to alleviate their “migraines.”

Not that giving convicts the vote is gonna solve everything, or even anything. When I was locked up I met a lotta white prison inmates who were racist, so they said fuck Obama, and all we get up there on the radio is the conservative shit, so these dummies listen to it, believe that it’s real, and become followers. I even met a few minorities who thought Glenn Beck spoke God’s honest truth, so who knows what the outcome would be if felons were granted the right to vote. Truth is we’d probably be too busy smoking rocks, gettin’ money, and fucking fat bitches to even know an election was scheduled. Criminals got better shit to do than waste their time voting, especially since listening to Alex Jones taught us all of these elections are rigged anyway. If I voted in New York, I’d probably do what I did back in high school mock elections and vote for “My Nuts.” That’s a candidate we can all believe in.

Bert Burykill is the pseudonym of our prison correspondent, who has spent time in a number of prisons in New York State. He tweets here.